Category Archives: coming soon

Nous beats expectations, raises £500,000 (US$750,000) from Angels and crowdfunding, to bring an ultra-low-risk trading service to millions of customers around the world.

London-based start-up Nous Global Markets today announced it has completed a successful round of funding that exceeded the initial target.

The company, which was created to educate people about the enjoyment and the challenges of financial markets, originally aimed to raise £350,000 but quickly reached that target and chose to halt over-funding at £500,000. The money was raised from a combination of Angel investors, Venture Capital and crowd-funding.

The investment is an important validation both of Nous’s traction since going live in 2014, having reached over 300,000 users at very low cost, and of their future plans. Nous will use the funds to release a revolutionary new trading application designed specifically for individuals that are excluded by current products.

Nous’ first round of funding was raised from private investors, predominantly senior finance and technology professionals at global investment banks. This second round brought crowd-funded investment via Syndicate Room‘s platform; as well as strategic investors such as Tantalus Capital, and K.V. Rao, CEO of California-based predictive analytics firm Aviso.

Justin Short, CEO of Nous, says:

“With the great success of our Spark Profit application we realised that there were millions of people with discretionary capital and the desire to trade in financial markets, but no way for them to do that economically. We will put the world’s most consumer-friendly trading system into their pockets: low-cost; ultra low-risk; and with up to 20x returns.”

Nous Global Markets was founded in September 2012 by Justin Short and four other former Merrill Lynch traders and technologists. Originally based in Tokyo it has since relocated to London and has received EIS Advance Assurance.

In January 2014, Short and his colleagues launched their free-to-play virtual trading game — ‘Spark Profit’ — which enables players to predict financial market movements with no risk, in return for cash prizes. Spark Profit’s uniquely visual, beginner-friendly interface and weekly cash rewards have already attracted over 300,000 users in 200 separate countries.

At the beginning of 2015, while learning more about their customers’ needs, they found that 95% of regular players wanted to trade their own money, preferably inside Spark Profit itself. A thorough review of the competition showed that there was indeed a very large opportunity to create a simple, low-risk way for people to trade — which would be a natural progression of the existing app and a validation of Nous’ “profit together” ethos. The new trading application will feature a unique combination of consumer-friendly features unavailable elsewhere. It is due for soft-launch in Q1 2016.

Contacts

About Nous

Nous, positioned at the intersection of Finance, Gaming and Education, was founded in 2012 by Justin Short and four other highly experienced traders and technologists. They saw an opportunity to empower people around the world to discover their own talents and benefit from access to global opportunities, via their smartphones. Nous launched Spark Profit, the free-to-play virtual trading game, in January 2014.

Nous aims to raise over £350,000 from the crowd in its second seed round

Nous Global Markets is raising funds to bring an ultra-low-risk trading service to millions of customers around the world.

London-based start-up Nous Global Markets was created to educate people about the enjoyment and the challenges of financial markets. It has already raised over £190,000 (US$290,000) of funding in this round and expects to reach a total of over £350,000 via a network of Angel investors.

The investment is an important validation both of Nous’s traction since going live in 2014, having reached over 300,000 users at a cost of under 50p per unique user, and of their future plans. Nous will use the funds to release a revolutionary trading application designed for individuals that are excluded by current financial products.

All of Nous’ funding to date has been raised from private investors, predominantly senior finance and technology professionals at global investment banks. This seed round has now been opened up at those same terms to Angel and HNWI investors, via the Syndicate Room investment platform.

Justin Short, CEO of Nous, says:

“With the great success of our Spark Profit application we realised that there were millions of people with discretionary capital and the desire to trade in financial markets, but no economically sensible way for them to actually do that. We will put the world’s most low-cost and consumer-friendly trading system into their pockets.”

Nous Global Markets was founded in September 2012 by Justin Short and four other former high flying Merrill Lynch traders and technologists. Originally based in Tokyo it has since relocated to London and has received EIS Advance Assurance.

In January 2014, Short and his colleagues launched their free-to-play virtual trading game — ‘Spark Profit’ — which enables players to predict financial market movements with no risk, in return for cash prizes. Spark Profit’s uniquely visual, beginner-friendly interface and weekly cash rewards have already attracted over 300,000 users in 200 separate countries.

At the beginning of 2015, while learning more about their customers’ needs, they found that 95% of regular players wanted to start real trading, ideally inside Spark Profit itself. A thorough review of the competition showed that there was indeed a very large opportunity to create a simple, low-risk way for people to trade — which would be a natural progression of the existing app and a validation of Nous’ “profit together” ethos. The new trading application will feature several consumer-friendly features that are unique in combination. It is due for soft-launch in Q1 2016.

Contacts

About Nous

Nous, positioned at the intersection of Finance, Gaming and Education, was founded in 2012 by Justin Short and four other highly experienced traders and technologists. They saw an opportunity to empower people around the world to discover their own talents and benefit from access to global opportunities, via their smartphones. Nous launched Spark Profit, the free-to-play virtual trading game, in January 2014.

Spark Profit’s regular users will know that we’ve been very interested to hear about how they use the app, and also about their interests and backgrounds. That’s because we are moving into the second phase of our plans and enabling real-money trading directly from within the app!

Before we could do that, there were a lot of things we needed to do. We’ve been unbelievably busy! The two most important ones were:

Make sure that we could guarantee you absolute safety and control of your own money, by getting a licence from a reputable regulator

Make sure that the product we will offer suits your needs and your circumstances

Working so hard on getting an operational licence, designing and building a completely new (and far better) way to trade, in addition to continuing running the best way to earn money while learning to trade, has been tough! Sometimes we haven’t been able to pay prizes or respond to your questions as quickly as we wanted, and we are really sorry about that. We are a small team and we try to keep support costs manageable (then we can pay more in prizes).

If you like Spark Profit, you’re going to love what we’re building now. We’ve kept the interface you’re used to: simple, visual, and with no jargon. But we’ve added a combination of features that no other trading application has, to bring you the safest and most rewarding way to trade on the planet, especially for small trade sizes. You’ll even be able to invest in any of our supported markets for just $0.10.

The only bad news is, you’ll have to wait until February next year. That’s how long it will take for our licence to get approved and the app released. If you’re interested in being one of the first to try the new app, please sign up here for early access.

Two hundred thousand players

We hit a wonderful milestone last week, when our 200,000th customer signed up to Spark Profit. We’re really excited about that! Spark Profit only went live in 2014, so we know that our goal – to find and nurture the world’s top trading talent – is really captivating a lot of people. We have players from over 200 countries and have paid out $146,000 in prizes to people in over 70 countries. And yet no-one has ever paid a penny! More at sparkprofit.com/stats/.

Two hundred thousand is a lot – click on the rainbow bar to see for yourself. Each row has 127 people on it and each shaded band of 8 rows has 1,000. Don’t forget to zoom in!

Second app: coming soon!

When we recently asked our regular players if they wanted to trade we were blown away by the response: 95% of players said they wanted to trade their own money in Spark Profit’s uniquely visual interface. Rest assured, we’re working hard on that plan! We’re applying for the necessary licenses and have started raising a second round of funding from Sophisticated and High Net Worth Investors. They see the huge potential for our existing customers to capitalise on their skills, and they love the traction (Alexa rank, WAUs, etc.) that we already have.

2x supporter bonus, for 2 months

Spark Profit has an easy way for you to invite friends and family to join the fun and start earning – simply share your invite link. If someone joins and starts to earn we’ve always paid you a generous 10% bonus, but for July and August you’ll get double that – whatever your friends earn you’ll earn 20% extra alongside them!

Two ways to earn

There’s always been two ways to earn money in Spark Profit: play well or invite someone who plays well. It’s really beneficial to invite many people because you simply never know in advance who’s going to get it right – and added up they will all help you earn a lot more over time. Why do we do this? Because it keeps our costs down and actually helps us pay more in prizes to you, our lovely players. (Although people love Spark Profit so much our ads only cost 10% of what other trading apps pay, so maybe we don’t need to worry too much! Something else the investors love.)

Nous Bows Crowd-Sourced Investor Sentiment Data

by Max Bowie. February 9 2014.

Startup trading application and data provider Nous will next week unveil a feed of crowd-sourced data aimed at banks and hedge funds that delivers a view of investor sentiment based on the trading decisions of investors using the vendor’s mobile app fantasy trading game.

This article talks about various aspect of our plans, including our belief that in the short term it is often human psychology that moves the markets, and that there is no comparable analysts recommendations for short-term market movements, only medium or long term ones.

2013 has been really amazing – it’s only 8 months since GAIN started paying cash rewards and already 13,000 players joined from 190 countries, to collectively earn over US $11,000. We think that’s fantastic! We’re very grateful for your help, and rather proud of ourselves all at the same time :).

As you can probably guess, we have plenty more in store for 2014.

A new name

In the middle of January GAIN will get a new name, its own website, and be released to Apple’s App Store. The changes are mostly cosmetic so you’ll still feel right at home though. You can still earn money in just minutes per week and, just like now, if you do very well one week you’ll still receive money for many weeks afterwards. Of course we’ll carry over your full history to the new site, so you won’t lose anything there either.

Scoring

There is one other important change coming at the same time, to scoring. Although many people might not be aware of it, points that you won or lost more than six months ago no longer count towards your score and do not help you earn money. This can be a surprise long term users, who hit this wall and see their total points “fall” at the start of every week. We wanted to make it feel fairer to them and easier for everyone to understand. We cannot say any more right now but rest assured that everyone gets equal treatment and we you will always be rewarded for careful, long-term playing.

Stability

You might have noticed that we had a couple of outages recently. We’ve been working literally round the clock to fix this: adding new data suppliers; buying machines and coding like crazy. Pretty soon we’ll also be able to release upgrades without having to stop everything. We will continue working to increase uptime even further.

Sharing

There are other changes planned over the course of the year. In addition to the rebranding and new scoring system, we will be increasing prizes — that is, if you can help us continue to grow and add more winning users! We also plan to add new markets to the app and also allow you to make predictions that last more than a week. In addition we’ll let you withdraw your earnings via Skrill or direct to your own Bitcoin wallet! And we’ll be making it easier to chat — and show off! — to your friends from inside the app.

Here’s to the future!

So thanks once again for helping us have such a fantastic first year. Together we really can have fun making a better, fairer world for millions of people – starting with you!